David W. Collins isn’t just the supervising sound editor at Skywalker Sound, he’s also a music expert with a specialty in John Williams’ compositions. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, David hosted a Star Wars Celebration panel fittingly titled “Attack of the Chords.” It was a deep dive into all of the music from the film, with an emphasis on “Across the Stars.”
For the prequel trilogy, John Williams chose to “write backwards,” deconstructing themes he wrote for the original trilogy and using that to form new themes. The trilogy tells the origin story of Darry Vader, but at its core is a forbidden love story between the parents of Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa, Annakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala.
“What’s in a name?”, David asked when discussing “Across the Stars,” the love theme for Annakin and Padme. The title is a play on the Shakespearean phrase “Star crossed lovers,” with the main melody carried by an obo, a nod to Tchaikovsky’s haunting music from “Swan Lake.”
The brilliance of “Across the Stars” is that it marries together themes John Williams wrote for Luke and Leia to foreshadow the love that gave birth to them. If music is just pitch and rhythm, then “Leila’s Theme” gives the piece its pitch and Luke’s Theme, widely known as the “Main Title,” is the rhythms of “Across the Stars.” The composition is arranged in a minor key, giving it a melancholy aesthetic rather than the major keys that Luke and Leia’s themes are presented in.
“Across the Stars” also foreshadows Annakin’s future, planting the first three notes of “The Imperial March” at the beginning of the piece, a track that became synonymous with Darth Vader. John Williams also pulls from music history in the arrangement, inserting the three-note queue for death (Dies irae) as a main rhythmic figure.
An accidental alarm at the Anaheim Convention Center interrupted the panel, cutting it short, but David W. Collins briefly touched on some of the other brilliance to be found in the score for Attack of the Clones. From “Yoda’s Theme” transformed into fight music to an electric guitar on the soundtrack version of “Zam the Assassin and the Chase Through Coruscant” (cut from the film), the presenter’s vast knowledge was on full display. He could probably dedicate a full hour just to controversies surrounding John Williams’ intentions for the finale of the film. Perhaps one day he will through his podcast The Soundtrack Show, through which he’s already covered the original trilogy.
Stay tuned to Laughing Place for more coverage from Star Wars Celebration.